All posts tagged steelmaking

ArcelorMittal’s hulking green-painted steel plant in rural Alabama is at the heart of Big Steel’s response to aluminum in the battle for one of the metal industry’s best customers: carmakers.

The aluminum industry made strides this year with Ford Motor Co.’s announcement that it would make the new F-150 principally out of aluminum. The metal–which although it is more expensive is, as a rule, lighter than steel–helps automakers meet new fuel efficiency standards.

Aluminum makers Alcoa Inc. and Novelis, a unit of India’s Hindalco Industries Ltd., have trumpeted recent investments totaling more than a billion dollars in new sheet production in Iowa, upstate New York, Tennessee and overseas. A report published this summer by Ducker Worldwide, a consulting and market research firm, says that 18% of all vehicles will have all-aluminum bodies by 2025, compared with less than 1% in 2014.

Steelmakers, facing their biggest defeat by aluminum since they lost the beer can in the 1970s, are also spending billions of dollars to fight back. Read More »

U.S. Steel Corp. has emerged as an unlikely proxy in a heated debate over the notion of disruptive innovation between Harvard historian Jill Lepore and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen.

She says patterns, and the evolution of history itself, are more unpredictable, and accuses Mr. Christensen of faulty logic and cherry-picking his example businesses like floppy drives and online education.

- Oversupply: Global steelmaking capacity is in “excess,” U.S. Steel said, which has depressed the prices U.S. Steel can charge for the flat-rolled metal it sells to auto and appliance makers. In addition, imports and “announced additional domestic tubular manufacturing capacity” have deflated prices for the steel pipes and tubes demanded by American oil and gas companies.

- Imports: U.S. Steel noted the “continued high level of tubular product imports.” They’re a consequence of oversupply — but still worth mentioning as a separate category.